TV REVIEW: Toulouse Lautrec - The Full Story (C4)

“You know what people come here for,” said our host, Waldemar Januszczak, conspiratorially. Showing less faith in his viewers than such a confident opening implied, he added: “They come… for this.” Cue dancing girls. We’re at the Moulin Rouge. He was right. We did know.
Thanks to John Huston’s original film version of ‘Moulin Rouge’, in which tonight’s subject, the artist Toulouse Lautrec, was played with cruel pantomime by an actor with false shoes attached to his knees, we also know that the artist tended towards being short. “He was a leetle man,” confirmed a Parisian vox pop. “A meeniscule man.” Januszczak, who all but allows the waters to break in the pregnant pauses for which he apparently knows of no contraceptive, was on hand to add the voice of authority. “This… little man… who hurried about here getting notorious.” Short, you say? “Yes, he was short. Yes, he drank. And yes, he did live in a brothel. But that’s just an itsy bitsy bit of his story. Toulouse Lautrec’s… tragedy… is that no one takes him… seriously.” The viewers’ tragedy was that they were not being taken seriously by a man they could not take seriously.
Still, it would be unfair to insinuate that Januszczak told us little more than Lautrec’s lack of height. There was also what the family did rectify it. Electric shocks and hanging weights, gruesomely enough. And, showing us around the family home, the amiable son-in-law of the wee man’s great niece also informed us that: “The mother, she learned English to her son.” “Taught him English,” corrected Januszczak, an itsy bitsy bit ironically.
The mother also learned her son that he could become France’s greatest artist, and packed him off to Paris for some formal training by the aristocracy’s favourite portrait man, Leon Bonnat. Cue a city-surveying Januszczak. “Whichever cliché you choose to bestow upon this steaming cauldron of depraved creativity,” he began, in somewhat ungainly haste to bestow his own. The classy option might have been not to bestow one at all.
So Lautrec decamped to the bottom of the road to Montmarte. Or, in Januszczak-speak, “Paris’ naughty quarter, with historic qualities of bad influence and temptation.” Not everyone’s history books, it would seem, lead to Rome.
When Bonair’s studio closed, master Lautrec’s new tutor encouraged more naturalistic observation, and up the road to decadence – and a revolutionary approach to painting - he walked. It was here that he developed a penchant for gauche American cocktails. Januszczak was surprised. Afterall, he reasoned, “you know what the French are like about their drink.” Showing a heroic level of graciousness, the Frenchman to whom he addressed this remark was kind enough to concede that, yes, he, too, knew just what they were like.
And so to the paintings themselves. Traditionally, of course, this is the area where the art historian would earn his corn by forensically teasing out a subtext in the work far beyond the reach of the casual viewer. With that in mind, here is Januszczak casting his eye over the tender portrait of the prostitute who took Lautrec’s virginity. “What really makes this an… interesting painting is what he’s done to her face. Look… she’s got her finger up to her mouth as if she’s sucking her fingers. And all this hair falling over her… eyes.”
Many are the Januszczak lovers wont to compare their hero to Sir David Attenborough. Sadly, that would only be valid if the Knight of the Creased Khaki were ever to stride garrulously into shot and offer enlightenment on the level of: “An… enormous animal… feeding its bulk by way of a trunk, swinging away there at the front of its large… grey body…”
It is, frankly, not enough. So, in the spotlight next week? Allow me to hazard a guess. “This… deeply troubled… one-eared man… In this painting, the interesting thing is that the sunflowers are yellow. And… look… they’re in a vase…”

MUSIC: Bryan Ferry

As originally published in Venue magazine:

It’s not cool to like Bryan Ferry. Roxy Music, sure, but not him. He was, afterall, carried through that group’s early years by the errant genius of Brian Eno. The point is proved by a solo career, covers-driven from the start, that has seen him come to resemble little more than a karaoke David Niven. Today he’s the brooding mannequin fronting an M&S clothing range, no mouth and all trousers. Worse yet, he bequeathed to the world Otis Ferry, poster boy of the Countryside Alliance, named after a soul singer and who spends his days – sing along if you know the words - sittin’ on the top of a horse, wastin’ foxes.
Well, the hell with that. Yes, Eno brought manic individualism to Roxy. But so did the freeform guitaring of Phil Manzanera, the wild sax and mournful oboe of Andy MacKay, and the skittish drumming of Paul Thompson. Few groups have harnessed such wilfully distinct elements into a sum still greater, and Ferry was the catalyst. The man looking like Comeback Special-era Elvis mugged by a girls’ high school make-up team, all black leather and glittery eyeshadow, provided focus. And his own contribution – musically an underrated pianist, vocally the jaded fop nevertheless convinced that the best party is just around the corner, affected disdain shielding the heart of a true romantic – is the most distinct of all. Roxy might never have recaptured the uniformly giddy heights enjoyed in the Eno years, but many are the later moments – ‘Mother Of Pearl’, ‘Out Of The Blue’ and ‘Street Life’ to name but three – that stand effortlessly alongside them.
The loucheness is a problem, I’ll grant you. Not stylistically, but in the way it’s apparently bled into a laissez-faire approach to quality control. Latterly, for every moment of AOR perfection (‘Oh Yeah’, ‘More Than This’) there’s been a ‘Taxi’, the mid-90s covers album so wretchedly uninspired that this unabashed Ferryhead has never made it to the end of side two. It’s even there on his new one, ‘Dylanesque’, a largely sleepwalking county-rock affair, and an illogical conclusion to the fandom originally highlighted with his urgent, piano-hammering take on His Bobness’ ‘A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall’ back in 1973. But yet, even here, there’s a gem to rival anything in the back catalogue. In the ghostly ‘Make You Feel My Love’ his voice is a mist rolling in across the moors, inflected with a new-found, Cash-echoing, pleading frailty. A voice he first mastered on two starkly haunting contributions to last year’s Warren Ellis-helmed collection of sea shanties, ‘Rogue’s Gallery’. And a voice highlighting a singer, well into his fourth decade of performing, for whom reinvention – despite too many inferences to the contrary - remains key.